Similarly, Judge Richard A. Posner, in an article in The New Republic in August, wrote that Heller’s failure to allow the political process to work out varying approaches to gun control that were suited to local conditions “was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade.”Yeah, that's just what we need: "home rule" for which rights will be recognized.
Hey, who needs a Fifth Amendment when you're in Chi-Town, anyway, huh? What, this rubber hose? It's in case the suspect gets thirsty under all these lights...
We talked about the other supposed "conservative," J. Harvie Wilkinson III (and tell me that name doesn't sound like it belongs cheating at bridge at Thurston Howell's country club) a while back, and again a while back further, and I gotta tell you, they just don't make "prominent" judges like they used to.
Consider, for example, William Rawle, a contemporary of the Founders, the man George Washington wanted as the first attorney general, and whose "View of the Constitution" was the "go to" resource at Harvard and Dartmouth until the mid-Nineteenth Century, who wrote:
“No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give the Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under a general pretence [sic] by a state legislature. But if in any pursuit of an inordinate power either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.”We can listen to him or we can listen to Dickie and Harvie. Come to think of it, if we listen to them, we might actually resolve things sooner.
[Via Zachary G]
How do these men get to such positions of responsability, and show themselves to be such accomplished liars? How did Warren Burger ever get on the SC? I have long believed that people who devout themselves to education, sometimes develop a certain blindness and counter-intelligence that causes them to become idiots, in light of the truth.
ReplyDeleteDevote? And they also become drunk with power.
ReplyDeleteJudge Wilkinson saved particular scorn for a brief passage in Justice Scalia’s opinion that seemed to endorse a variety of restrictions on gun ownership. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
ReplyDeleteWhatever else may be said about the Second Amendment, Judge Wilkinson wrote, those presumptions have no basis in the Constitution. “The Constitution’s text,” he wrote, “has as little to say about restrictions on firearm ownership by felons as it does about the trimesters of pregnancy.”
At least J. Harvie got that part right, although I seriously doubt he'll follow it to its logical conclusion.